Bruce Wood

The British Enchanters and George Granville's Theory of Opera

In the first edition of the encyclopaedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart the article on ‘opera’ by Anna Amalie Abert (1962) began with a clear-cut definition of the term: Eine Oper im weitesten Sinne des Begriffs ist eine wie immer geartete Buhnenhandlung, die entweder ganz oder in wesentlichen Teilen in Musik gesetzt ist; dabei mus diese Handlung von vornherein auf die Mitwirkung der Musik hin erfunden bzw. im Hinblick auf sie bearbeitet sein. An opera in the broadest sense of the word is a stage play of whatever kind which is entirely or substantially set to music; the play must either be invented from the outset for the involvement of music or be revised for this purpose. In the Supplement of the second edition of the same encyclopaedia a new article on ‘opera’ appeared. The authors of this article, Silke Leopold and Dorte Schmidt (2008), emphasise the point that no explicit definition of opera can be given and that the term has been dissolved in a flood of different uses during the history of European music: Oper ist kein Gattungsbegriff, sondern ein diffuser Name fur unterschiedliche Formen des europaischen bzw. europaisch gepragten musikalischen Theaters ab ca. 1600, in zweiter Linie auch fur die zu dessen Auffuhrung bestimmten Bauwerke. Die Verwendung des Begriffs ist weniger durch terminologische Stringenz und spezifische Definitionen gekennzeichnet als durch pragmatischen, zuweilen auch polemischen Sprachgebrauch. Daher lasst sich seine Bedeutung historisch eher uber die Kontexte solchen Gebrauchs als durch definitorische Setzungen oder von einer normativen Gattungspoetik her erschliesen. Opera is not a generic term but a diffuse designation for various forms of European musical theatre from 1600 on and also, in a secondary sense, for the buildings intended for their performance. The application of the word is characterised less by terminological consistency or specific definitions than by a pragmatic and sometimes polemical usage. Therefore its meaning throughout history should be reconstructed rather from the contexts of its use than from definitions or from a normative poetics of genre. If this is the case, what we should do before deciding whether to label a phenomenon an opera is to reconstruct as exactly as possible the historical situations in which the term was originally used.

Ombra mai fu: Shades of Greece and Rome in the Librettos for Handel's London Operas

In 481 BC, as Xerxes was approaching Sardis with his enormous expeditionary force, he was one day south of Sardis when, according to Herodotus VII. 31, he ‘came across a plane tree of such beauty that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to appoint a guardian for it in perpetuity’. Meanwhile at Abydos, on the south shore of the Hellespont, north-west of Sardis, his engineers had been constructing two bridges across the Hellespont, which Herodotus tells us about almost immediately afterwards (chapters 33–6). At one stage, he says, the work was successfully completed, but a storm of great violence smashed it up and carried everything away. Xerxes was very angry when he learned of the disaster, and he gave orders that the Hellespont should receive three hundred lashes and have a pair of fetters thrown into it. I have heard before now that he also sent people to brand it with hot irons. … In addition to punishing the Hellespont, he gave orders that the men responsible for building the bridges should have their heads cut off. His orders were of course carried out, the bridges were rebuilt, and after wintering in Sardis he and his force set off for Abydos in the spring of 480; it took them seven days and seven nights without a break to cross over to Europe on the bridges, and the rest is history – or, if you are Minato or Stampiglia, Cavalli or Bononcini or Handel, the rest is fiction. In the Minato–Stampiglia libretto of Handels Serse , the plane tree is evidently at Abydos (it has been transplanted some 150 miles), Xerxes is already there when the storm comes, and apart from those slight distortions of approximately one page of Herodotus’ monumental work there is precious little in the opera that has anything to do with any ancient evidence for Xerxes or his famous expedition to Greece. The plane tree is given far more prominence at the beginning of the opera than it receives in Herodotus, who deals with it in thirteen words of Greek, and the storm comes over as rather a tame affair, focalised through the comic character Elviro: we are not shown Xerxes reacting to it in any way, and there is nothing about his angry treatment of the Hellespont and the engineers.